CF500A black · standard

CF500A is the standard black in HP's 202A set, and in our catalogue it fits the Color LaserJet Pro M254dw and the Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw. It is one of four cartridges those printers take, and the only one an ordinary text document touches.

At 1400 rated pages for $75.00 it prints at 5.36c a page. The high yield CF500X brings that down to 4.06c, about 24 percent less for $55.00 more at the till, which is a real gap but a smaller one than most colour lasers offer on black. A machine that mostly prints text will pay the step back; one that prints a few pages a week probably will not.

Black behaves differently from the three colours here, and that matters at the checkout. It empties first on document printing and it is the cartridge most often bought alone, so there is no reason to keep a matched set. Running a CF500X black alongside standard colours is perfectly normal and usually the cheapest way to keep the printer going.

HP publishes a dynamic security notice for the M254dw on its own store page, so the printer checks each cartridge for an HP chip, and a firmware update can start refusing a compatible CF500A that had been printing for months. Set updates to do not check before the first compatible goes in. The imaging drum is built into each of these cartridges, which is why our listing for these printers shows four toners and no separate drum part, and why a repeating defect in black alone belongs to the black cartridge and leaves with it.